Paper currencies have a long track record of failure. This failure is due to the inherent flaws of mankind rather then a fundamental problem with paper money.
We choose to embrace things like fractional reserve lending, defect spending, and unfounded entitlements all of which lead to fiscal instability and undermine the currency system leading to eventual failure.
Gold and Silver are simply attempts to take human weakness out of the picture by tying the concept of money to something that cannot be easily forged or mass produced. This works to a degree but it historically also ultimately fails to restrain us from eventually debasing and destroying the currency system. We see this in Rome and also in our recent past as we were not long ago on a gold standard.
Once again you ruin your analysis by conflating morality and opportunity cost. Morality is your hammer and everything is a nail. Humans aren't doing everything they do because they are weak. They are acting rational from an opportunity cost analysis. Tragedies-of-the-commons are the result of rational localized actions in which the aggregate result is irrational. Morality is not a solution, because it is never absolute truth and is always manipulable as well. Gold is an inferior measure of value because for example regional distribution/control of mines is not equitable or non-manipulable (well
everything fungible is manipulable as I explained in my recent mini-essay). I explained in that essay that I am working on a solution that will supercede morals and absolute values.
You are correct that voting would make Bitcoin another fiat system. But it isn't because humans are weak. It is because of the economics of voting. See my prior post.
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Tragedies-of-the-commons are the result of localized actions in which the aggregate result is irrational carried out by individuals acting in error because their frame of reference or time horizon is excessively limited.
And the only solution is to remove the
constant marginal utility (i.e. non-diminishing utility of economies-of-scale) of the power of aggregate action. Morality is yet another economies-of-scale aggregate action, which is thus just as flawed as any other. Here is
a real world example of winner-take-all economies-of-scale.
I am not arguing against the importance of top-down organization, and I've pointed out this distinction to you numerous times that if top-down organization doesn't have a constant marginal utility of economies-of-scale, then it is self-limiting and multiple top-down structures are in fact a decentralized structure.
I wrote as @anonymous:
O/T assigned a descriptive model where nodes or their connections are assumed to have unequal value without any model for why they do. Eric posited a generative model wherein communication has a space-time frictional cost. Subsequent commentary has pointed out that the more generalized generative model is that networking (in the generalized conceptualization of communication and/or group formation) has a myriad of genres of opportunity cost (e.g. even political opportunity cost in cooperative games theory), so this can account for preferences in group formation which may in some cases be independent of physical transport costs.
Something else occurred to me while reading the O/T paper before reading Robert Willis's thoughts, and I think combining the opportunity cost generalization with the following insight might model his point. Note that if the possible connections between nodes are limited by opportunity cost weighted compatibility of groups of nodes, then we can approximate a model of the network as connections between groups (aka clusters) of nodes. In this case, the equations for relative value of network mergers changes such that it is possible for the value proposition to invert between small and larger networks, if the larger network has fewer groupings (on an opportunity cost potential connections weighted basis). O/T mentioned clusters but in the context of their descriptive model of assumed unequal value. The key point of opportunity cost is that value is relativistic to the observer. The highly relativistic model is capable of higher-order effects such as those described by Robert Willis. Demographics matter.
I want to investigate whether Verlinde's entropic force
emergent information based gravitation model is applicable and perhaps a generative mathematical foundation.
The solution is the Inverse Commons.
I am designing a blockchain to enable the Inverse Commons on a much greater scale. Because Bitcoin's long-term failure mode is aggregation into one whale who controls everything (precisely as predicted in the Bible), because of the constant marginal utility of a stable reserve in finance.